Ghost Wars

Steve Coll traces the CIA's secret involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion of 1979 through the eve of September 11, 2001, built from declassified documents, congressional testimony and interviews with the American, Pakistani and Afghan officials who ran the war. The book opens with the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence service funneling American and Saudi money into training camps along the Afghan border, arming mujahideen fighters against the Soviet occupation and drawing in Arab volunteers from across the Middle East with little thought given to what would happen to them once the war ended. One of those volunteers is a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whom Coll follows from the Afghan front through his break with the Saudi government, his years in Sudan and his return to Afghanistan under Taliban protection.

Coll organizes two decades of this history chronologically and shows how bureaucratic caution in Washington, rotating station chiefs, congressional oversight fights and a Clinton administration wary of committing American forces or clear legal authority let bin Laden slip past several chances to be killed or captured before the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He gives real weight to the people who did the actual work in the field, station chiefs, Pakistani generals, Afghan commanders such as Ahmad Shah Massoud, rather than treating Washington policy alone as the story.

Reading Ghost Wars means moving through more than seven hundred dense pages of institutional history rather than a single dramatic narrative, closer to an intelligence agency's own case file than to a thriller, and it rewards a reader with patience for how a war gets run through committees, budgets and shifting alliances as much as through combat. It suits anyone who wants to understand how the alliances forged against the Soviets in the 1980s hardened, largely unexamined, into the threat that produced September 11.